McCain Nuclear Energy Plan Could Cost $315 Billion

John McCain's plan to revive the U.S. nuclear power industry with 45 new reactors may cost $315 billion, with taxpayers bearing much of the financial risk.

The Republican presidential nominee wants the plants built in time to help the U.S. meet a 29 percent increase in electricity demand by 2030. Industry estimates put their cost at $7 billion each. Barack Obama, McCain's Democratic opponent, is less specific about his plans, saying he wants to ``find ways to safely harness nuclear power.''

Global warming and the rising cost of fossil fuels have boosted chances that atomic energy will supply more U.S. electricity. Public concerns remain about reactor safety and disposing of waste that stays hazardous for millennia. Investment bankers, citing the industry's cost overruns in the 1980s, say they won't finance its long-sought ``nuclear renaissance'' without federal backing.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[TroubleNYC]

Yet ANOTHER McCain economic gaffe!

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/16/mccain-commits-gaffe/

[08politicaljunkie]

Vote SAFE not Haste!

Obama/Biden '08

[Progress08]

That's all we need, hundreds of nuclear power plants that make great terrorist targets and radically increase the damage to our waterways. Blowing up a bio-diesel fuelled power plant won't kill thousands.

[cubs325]

all that money and still left with an insurmountable issue - what to do with the waste!!! No scientific technology answers to that!!!

Why not spend more of that money on renewables

[princessofnowt]

why dont we do renewables ourselves?

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/8/24/141650/573

is just one example of easy & cheap make your own wind & solar.

why are we waiting for the corporate version?

Energy independent?
Lets be corporate - independent!!!
Seriously!

Just google make your own solar and make your own wind.

For less than a few months of your normal bill, you can have free electricity.
All the time

Might be eyesore, but I'll take ugly house over war and killing, and nuclear waste.

Come on everybody!!! Whats it gonna take?

This is not a Them issue. Let 'them' do it- you'll be paying dearly.

It is a YOU issue. Look it up, go get the stuff, and lets see a bunch of energy independent houses in our own neighborhoods NOW.

[jimgilliamv2]

Republicans are capitalists until they need money from the government. Let the private sector build the plants and take the risks.

[DebbieinPhx]

Well no, let's run it like we ran Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, it's private, and the private sector takes all the profits and then they run it into the ground so that the American tax payers can pay to bail it out. Yeah, more life under the McCain-Bush plan

[Progress08]

pfft. They'd go around all the safety regs then when caught (3 mile island) they'll file bankruptcy and the very people who decided to skimp on safety will get golden parachutes. Because the plant is part of the infrastructure the US Gov't will have no choice but to pick up the pieces.

[terramartom]

What Judgement Senator Brown Nose McCain!

[ricitizen]

A future President gives us another preview of his leadership today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlZt5iN96iM

Obama/Biden '08

[Vote For America]

Sept 16 Polling Update
http://voteforamerica.net/editorials/Comments.aspx?ArticleId=57&ArticleName=Poll+Update

Cindy McCain's Fallacious Rebuttal
http://voteforamerica.net/editorials/Comments.aspx?ArticleId=54&ArticleName=Cindy+McCain%27s+Fallacious+Rebuttal

The Red November: An analysis on campaign marketing
http://voteforamerica.net/editorials/Comments.aspx?ArticleId=50&ArticleName=The+Red+November

Obama 264, McCain 274
http://voteforamerica.net/electoral.aspx

[SwingingFromCenter]

And this has what to do with nuclear power?

[DebbieinPhx]

uhmmmm, good question. Oh wait, I know.... the computer chip in McCain's brain short circuited and he went ballistic...er, nuclear!!

[HeIsTheOne]

I remember when John McCain said "I could find $100 billion tomorrow".

He'd be 1/3 the way there to go nuclear.

[DebbieinPhx]

Yeah, but that's before Cindy gets sick of him stealing from her piggy bank

[Sumocat]

Here's my summary...

McCain: New plants first, worry about waste later.
Obama: Better fuel and waste management first, then new plants.

I could actually go either way on the issue, except I doubt we'll actually build better waste management systems if the promise of new plants isn't used as incentive. If McCain has his way, we'll have a lot of new plants churning out a lot of new waste and the same broken old system to manage it. No thanks.

[grizhead63]

Nuclear waste has a half-life of 25,000 years and nobody wants it near their community so most of it is staying sealed up at the nuclear plants. There is no place in the USA to safely transport or store this toxic and deadly stuff and we surely can't ship it to the moon.

Republican John McCain should give us some answers on that before we have any more nuclear construction. We should definitely look at all other options first.

[SwingingFromCenter]

Before you spew off about things you don't know, might I Try a 10 second google search?

Try "Yucca Mountain". That should get you going. Thanks.

[DebbieinPhx]

Hmmm good site, but the only problem with that is that the Rethuglicans cut the budget to this project this year, ooops. And that certainly isn't the end of the story:

The latest Total System Life Cycle Cost presented to Congress on July 15, 2008 by Director Sproat is $90 billion dollars. This cost,however, can not be compared to previous estimates since it includes a repository capacity about twice as large as previously estimated over a much longer period of time (100 years vs 30 years). Additionally, the cost of the project continues to escalate due to the lack of sufficient funding to most efficiently move forward and complete the project. Where are these BILLIONS going to come from? We're broke! And Uncle McNutty cut the budget to this, and he has NO plans as far as how he can bring this thing forward. That 315 Billion dollar price tag was on the implementation side, it did not account for the back end...ie: Yucca Mountain. So if grizhead63 was just spewing what were you doing... SPLAT?

[Progress08]

And think about how much more nuclear waste there would be if we start building more and more nuclear plants.

[climbupyourbrain]

Hi, It is frightening to see politicians support something they obviously don't understand. Humans make mistakes. Our brains are designed to learn from our errors. Hopefully, we are able to make mistakes that we can actually learn from. Sometimes we can't. For instance, if the train crash in L.A. is the result of texting or lack of redundant systems, perhaps we can prevent another crash. However, people have died and been seriously injured. But what about nuclear power? Although it isn't discussed very often, in Russia, even after all these years, serious health problems and infant deformities are still occurring from their devastating but rather small nuclear disaster. Can we learn? In light of the fact that we have power alternatives without this level of danger, why risk it? Dr. M

[jymfrancais]

French in the US.
France depends a lot on nuclear energy.
A couple of incidents well reported in France happened a couple months ago
in 2 differents nuclear plants, people extremly worry about the safety of the area..air, water, ground. a lot of people in countryside france depends a lot on home growing and gardening for food..
all of the nuclear plants are aging
strangely theses past incidents were not reported in the US.

[SwingingFromCenter]

Bah, I did the math wrong. But my point still stands. We need nuclear energy.

[teron678]

Where do you plan on storing the waste.. if it's on your property .. i welcome it ....

[SwingingFromCenter]

Geez, has NOBODY on this site heard of the fact that we've paid to carve out a mountain in Nevada?

We've ALREADY PAID FOR IT. Your tax dollars at work and you don't even know.

And you wanna talk politics?!

[SpinDizzy]

It's impossible to estimate how much 40 functioning nuclear plants would actually cost. In the past the overruns have been spectacular.

Then there's the question of how long it would take to build them. And the matter of where to put the waste. McCain sure didn't want it anywhere near his home state of Arizona.

But if you put half a trillion into wind, hydro, geothermal and solar energy, you get renewable power from unlimited sources.

Or we could just drill drill drill.

[SwingingFromCenter]

Geez, didn't I just answer this?

Where to put them is simple: You throw a couple in the Dakotas. You put one in Wyoming. You toss one in the middle of the Arizona desert. You plant one in some really lousy part of Mississippi (as Lewis Black says..."you won't have to go far"). We've got a ton of open space for these things.

As to where to put the waste: Um, maybe you haven't heard....but we carved out a mountain in Nevada to store the waste.

Wind isn't viable. The turbines take up too much space. See that huge field GE created? It powers a small city. A SMALL city. The field is the size of a city. Solar costs too much. We haven't mastered geothermal (and there are worries that trying to harness it from volcanoes will have diastrous consequences). And how much hydro can we create?

[SpinDizzy]

You don't answer how much it would actually cost to build them. Don't forget to include the litigation by citizens who don't want nuclear plants in their own back yards. From 2000 through October 2007, nuclear power plant construction costs -- mainly materials, labor and engineering -- have gone up 185 percent! That means a nuclear power plant that would have cost $4 billion to build in 2000 would have cost more than $11 billion to build last October. And we're looking at a lead time on new construction of at least ten years, so costs will keep on rising.

At the end of August 2007, American Electric Power CEO Michael Morris said that because of construction delays and high costs, the company wasn't planning to build any new nuclear plants.

In October 2007, Florida Power and Light (FPL), "a leader in nuclear power generation," presented its detailed cost estimate for new nukes to the Florida Public Service Commission. It concluded that two units totaling 2,200 megawatts would cost from $5,500 to $8,100 per kilowatt -- $12 billion to $18 billion total!

In January, MidAmerican Nuclear Energy Co. said prices were so high it was ending its pursuit of a nuclear power plant in Payette County, Idaho, after spending $13 million researching its economic feasibility. Company president Bill Fehrman said, "Consumers expect reasonably priced energy, and the company's due diligence process has led to the conclusion that it does not make economic sense to pursue the project at this time."

[SwingingFromCenter]

This is actually one of the things I'm with Johnny P0W about. I think we do need to build a bunch of nuclear reactors and do away with coal. The thing is....315 billion is a lot of money yes. But know what it is? 100 days in Iraq.

So let's just leave 100 days earlier than anticipated and we'll fund the reactors that way.

[japobere]

Oh right, why didn't anyone think of that before?